When is a horse too fat? When its backside looks more like an overripe peach than an 'apple'? When the crest on its neck behaves rather like a mattress does when you try to carry one upright? Or when you routinely have to use ballast tied to a rope to ensure your methane-filled ponies don't float off like those horrible step parents in the Harry Potter movie?
The way the grass is growing at the moment, with all this warm, wet weather, is causing a fair few horse owners to tear out large chunks of hair - their own, that is - at the rate horses and ponies are able to expand. The grass is only allowed to grow like this in May. By July and August, it's supposed to be a bit burnt off and we're supposed to be relaxed and carefree, concentrating on al fresco entertainment and summer shows, and largely leaving the horses to it. That’s not the case with my friend’s crafty Connemara cross – despite carefully setting up robust electric fencing to control his grass intake, he is frequently found three paddocks away in the mornings, in knee-high lush grass. She couldn’t work out how he was doing it until she spied him actually managing to limbo underneath each line of fencing! Someone else watched their pony gather himself up – or rather psyche himself up – and then rush under the electric fence, prepared to ‘take’ the imminent shock.
I had great plans for pasture management earlier this year. Smugly drawing a plan of my paddocks, I worked out that we could harrow, re-seed, roll and rest the trashed home paddocks beautifully so that by autumn, they would be festooned with a sward of strong, fresh grass ready to take on the winter pounding. It was all going so well and then 'the rains' hit in May and didn’t’ seem to stop, transforming the track up to my summer field into a torrential mud slide that created an impressive - and slippery - Mississipi delta in the yard. The only other way of getting the horses up to the field is at the other end, where a far more lethal slope sends them hurtling steeply into the dip at the bottom and up the other side - carnage when wet.
So, for a few weeks while we contemplated building an Ark, the horses were relegated into the newly harrowed, re-seeded, rolled and not-at-all rested home paddocks. Hoping they would ignore the newly seeded bits, where fragile shoots could just be glimpsed in their infancy, they of course decided that these areas had to be given their full attention. Not just for eating, but playing, stampeding and rolling - and rolling. After a while, I was re-considering the idea of getting them up the mudslide and into the top field, where, despite not being able to get a roller up there, I was beginning not to care about the potential divots. But then the grass took a Jack and the Beanstalk turn and went mad, and soon, I could hardly see my dogs bounding about in it. Enticingly emerald green and bursting with health, it screamed 'Laminitis', so the horses stayed in the home paddocks, where smooth, freshly flattened bare circles of wet earth appeared daily.
'Whatever.' I mused, determined not to get hysterical. 'At least they won't get fat.' Ha. Soon, they were standing in the barn and yard all day, ballooning alarmingly, despite being ridden at least five days a week. Around here, hacking generally involves lots of open grassland canters and hillwork on varied off-road terrain, so it's not playschool, and usually does the trick.
As one does, I started asking around. 'Are your horses fat?' 'No...' came the frequent reply, causing me to get that sudden cold feeling when one makes a stupid blunder in front of a competent horseman. '...They're Obese,' was the reassuring conclusion. Once friend put their fifteen ponies out in a new field for only a few hours and, bringing them back in overnight for fear of Laminitis, was kept awake most of the night listening to the exploding methane noises from the yard. Someone else advised me to, 'Tie black bin liners around your ponies, everywhere - right up their necks - and lunge them.' Mmmm, interesting, but I think it might be me ending up wearing the bin liners with the ponies nowhere in sight.
I don't know what the solution is - you can only ride or loose school them so much; you can keep them in at night or in the day; you can keep them in all the time - but then their gut bacteria changes and it's even more of a shock to their system when they go out. If they're in, they get more frustrated. If they're out all the time, they get fat. And then you look at the native moorland pony herds, wandering over hundreds or thousands of acres of varied - and sometimes rich-looking - grazing and they never get Laminitis. Perhaps it's the variety of roughage, rough grazing, plant life and constant exercise, but they've certainly got something to teach us.
Copyright Dawn Williams
|
